IF no security contingency plan is yet in place, the country’s armed services (police and military) should immediately draw up one because the likelihood of an election failure is not far removed as a result of the massive hacking of the confidential biometric files of voters stored in the Commission on Elections (Comelec) databank.
The hacked data included the complete names, fingerprints, pictures, cell phones and landline telephone numbers, individual addresses of 54,363,329 voters and the exact locations of the 84,000 clustered precincts they will be voting in on election day (May 9) in 81 provinces, 145 cities and 1,489 municipalities throughout the country.
The National Capital Region officially listed 6,253,249 voters; Luzon, 24,164,023; the Visayas, 11,316,792; and Mindanao, 12,629,265.
Hackers, who called themselves Anonymous, stole these files as early as last year and systematically uploaded them early this month on several occasions in various web sites, using cut-outs and Torrent software they themselves had cleverly set up to avoid detection.
Just to show you how smart the hackers were, they used the Torrent software so that the data, once downloaded, could be seeded to other computers and make them accessible to many people.
In an automated election, cheating is usually done days, weeks or even months before the voting day.
Just imagine a plausible cheating scenario where preprogrammed results, using hacked biometric voters data, are inserted into the memory disc of a vote counting machine (VCM) to favor a losing candidate or a general confusion that may occur if voters’ lists in the precincts are changed minutes before election time using preprinted lists based on the hacked files to disenfranchise voters of a leading candidate.
Losing candidates can also create a winning trend using preprogrammed data copied from the stolen files sent by short message service (SMS) or multiple message service (MMS) from select locations to the unsuspecting media and the Internet or the main frame of the Comelec in Manila.
The main frame itself has a memory of its own, and it can be pre-programmed to favor a particular candidate or candidates.
There are countless possibilities of cheating using the stolen files. Up for grabs are more than 19,000 elective positions, from the president down to a town councilor, this coming election.
Why the urgent need for a security contingency plan? Unknown to many people, democracy abhors a leadership vacuum.
Only the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police, as protector of the State and its four elements—people, government, sovereignty and territory—have the preponderant manpower capability to take over the government to prevent a vacuum in case of an election failure.
This is so because under the flawed 1987 Aquino Constitution, the President, the Vice President, the Senate President and the Speaker of the House, who are in the line of succession, have no holdover powers to run the government after June 30, 2016.
The 1935 Constitution and the 1972 Constitution, which the late President Corazon Cojuangco Aquino deliberately abolished in 1986, included the Chief Justice in the line of succession precisely to prevent a leadership vacuum.
In their haste to frame the 1987 Constitution, the 48 men and women, including leftists and prelates, handpicked by President Aquino to write the new fundamental law of the land, failed to include the chief magistrate in the line of succession.
To reach the writer, e-mail cecilio.arillo@gmail.com